I suspect these articles are targeted at techies and tinkerers, where being able to do things their way is very important to them. This is reflected in the many mentions of tinkering with registry keys, which I never have nor felt the need to.

I personally run win11 for gaming, android for media consumption and proxmox for homelab and I think all of these systems are fine as is. They serve their purpose well enough.

My prediction is that steamOS (when it is released) will end up being the only mainstream Linux desktop because of its corporate backing. It would be interesting to see desktop Linux mimicking the android ecosystem, where different vendors provide a different skin on top of SteamOS.